UCLA Bruins men's basketball


The UCLA Bruins men's basketball program represents the University of California, Los Angeles, in the sport of men's basketball as a member of the Big Ten Conference. Established in 1919, the program has won a record 11 NCAA titles. Coach John Wooden led the Bruins to 10 national titles in 12 seasons, from 1964 to 1975, including seven straight from 1967 to 1973. UCLA went undefeated a record four times. Coach Jim Harrick led the team to another NCAA title in 1995. Former coach Ben Howland led UCLA to three consecutive Final Four appearances from 2006 to 2008. As a member of the AAWU, Pacific-8 and then Pacific-10, UCLA set an NCAA Division I record with 13 consecutive regular season conference titles between 1967 and 1979 which stood until tied by Kansas in 2017. UCLA departed the Pac-12 Conference and joined the Big Ten Conference on August 2, 2024.

NCAA records

UCLA men's basketball has set several NCAA records.
  • 11 NCAA titles
  • 7 consecutive NCAA titles
  • 13 NCAA title game appearances*
  • 10 consecutive Final Four appearances
  • 25 Final Four wins*
  • 38 game NCAA Tournament winning streak
  • 134 weeks ranked No. 1 in AP Top 25 Poll
  • 54 consecutive winning seasons
  • 88 game men's regular season winning streak
  • 4 undefeated seasons
  • 13 straight conference championships
* 1980 tournament final vacated by NCAA

History

Early years (1919–1948)

In 1919, Fred Cozens became the first head coach of the UCLA basketball and football teams. Cozens coached the basketball team for two seasons, finishing with an overall record of 21–4. Caddy Works was the head coach of the Bruins from 1921 to 1939, guiding them to a 173–159 record. Works was a lawyer by profession and coached the team only during the evenings. According to UCLA player and future Olympian Frank Lubin, Works was "more of an honorary coach" with little basketball knowledge. Dick Linthicum was UCLA's first All-American in any sport, earning selections in 1931 and 1932. Wilbur Johns was the UCLA basketball head coach from 1939 to 1948, guiding the Bruins to a 93–120 record.

John Wooden era (1948–1975)

From 1948 to 1975, John Wooden, nicknamed the "Wizard of Westwood", served as UCLA's head coach. He won ten NCAA national championships in a 12-year period, including a run of seven in a row that shattered the previous record of only two consecutive titles; to this day, no other team has won more than two straight titles. Within this period, his teams won a men's basketball-record 88 consecutive games.
Prior to Wooden's arrival, UCLA had only won two conference championships in the previous 18 years. In his first season, Wooden guided a UCLA team that had finished with a 12–13 record the previous year to a 22–7 record—then the most wins in a season in program history—and the Pacific Coast Conference Southern Division championship. In his second season, Wooden led the Bruins to a 24–7 record and the PCC championship. The Bruins would win the division title in each of the next two seasons and the conference title in the latter season. Up to that time, UCLA had won only two division titles since the PCC began divisional play, and it had not won a conference title of any kind since winning the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference in 1927.
In 1955–56, Wooden guided the Bruins to their first undefeated PCC conference title and a 17-game winning streak that only came to an end in the 1956 NCAA Tournament at the hands of a University of San Francisco team that featured Bill Russell. However, UCLA was unable to maintain this level of performance over the immediate ensuing seasons, finding itself unable to return to the NCAA Tournament as the Pete Newell-coached California teams took control of the conference at the end of the decade. Also hampering the fortunes of Wooden's team during that time period was a probation imposed on all UCLA sports in the aftermath of a scandal involving illegal payments made to players on the school's football team, along with USC, Cal and Stanford, resulting in the dismantling of the PCC conference.
File:Lew Alcindor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar UCLA.jpg|thumb|upright|left|Lew Alcindor makes a reverse two hand dunk.
By 1962 the probation was no longer in place and Wooden had returned the Bruins to the top of their conference. This time, however, they would take the next step, and go on to unleash a run of dominance unparalleled in the history of college sports. A narrow loss due largely to a controversial foul call in the semifinal of the 1962 NCAA Tournament convinced Wooden that his Bruins were ready to contend for national championships. Two seasons later, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place when assistant coach Jerry Norman persuaded Wooden that the team's small-sized players and fast-paced offense would be complemented by the adoption of a zone press defense. The result was a dramatic increase in scoring, giving UCLA a powerhouse team led by Walt Hazzard and Gail Goodrich that went undefeated on its way to the school's first basketball national championship.
Wooden's team repeated as national champions the following season before the squad fell briefly in 1966 when it finished second in the conference to Oregon State. UCLA was ineligible to play in the NCAA tournament that year because in those days only conference champions went to the tournament. However, the Bruins' incarnation returned with a vengeance in 1967 with the arrival of sophomore All-America and MVP Lew Alcindor. The team reclaimed not only the conference title but the national crown with an undefeated season.
In January 1968, UCLA took its 47-game winning streak to the Astrodome in Houston, where Alcindor, below par with an injured eye, squared off against Elvin Hayes in the Game of the Century, which was the nation's first nationally televised regular season college basketball game. Houston upset UCLA 71–69 behind Hayes' 39 points. In a post-game interview, Wooden stated, "We have to start over." They did, and went undefeated the rest of the year, avenging Houston 101–69 in the semi-final rematch of the NCAA tournament en route to the national championship. Hayes, who had been averaging 37.7 points per game, was held to only 10 points. Wooden credited Norman for devising the diamond-and-one defense that contained the Houston center.
The emergence of the Bruins under Wooden vastly increased the program's popularity. Since 1932, the Bruins had played at the Men's Gym. It normally seated 2,400, but had been limited to 1,500 since 1955 by order of the city fire marshal. This forced games to be moved to Pan Pacific Auditorium, the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena and other venues around Los Angeles when larger crowds were expected—an increasing inconvenience since the Bruins' first national title. At Wooden's urging, a much larger on-campus facility was built in time for the 1965–66 season, the nearly 13,000 seat Pauley Pavilion.
Wooden coached his final game in Pauley Pavilion on March 1, 1975, when UCLA trounced Stanford 93–59. Four weeks later, following a 75–74 overtime victory over Louisville in the 1975 NCAA Tournament semifinal game, Wooden announced that he would retire at age 64 immediately after the championship game. His legendary coaching career concluded triumphantly, as his team responded with a win over Kentucky to claim Wooden's first career coaching victory over the Wildcats and his unprecedented 10th national championship in a twelve-year span.
During his tenure with the Bruins, Wooden became known as the "Wizard of Westwood", although he personally disdained the nickname. He gained lasting fame at UCLA by winning 620 games in 27 seasons and 10 NCAA titles during his last 12 seasons, which included seven in a row from 1967 to 1973. His UCLA teams also had a then-record winning streak of 88 games and four perfect 30–0 seasons. They also won 38 straight games in NCAA Tournaments and 98 straight home game wins at Pauley Pavilion. Wooden was named NCAA College Basketball's "Coach of the Year" in 1964, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 and 1973. In 1967, he was named the Henry Iba Award USBWA College Basketball Coach of the Year. In 1972, he shared Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsman of the Year" award with Billie Jean King. He was named to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach in 1973, becoming the first to be honored as both a player and a coach.

Association with Sam Gilbert

During Wooden's time at UCLA, and after his retirement in 1975, he faced criticism for the program's relationship with local businessman and booster Sam Gilbert, known by many of Wooden's players as "Papa Sam." Gilbert, a multi-millionaire contractor, was known for forging close financial relationships with UCLA players, supplying them with cars, clothes, stereos, travel, and apartments, as well as allegedly arranging abortions for players' girlfriends. He represented several UCLA stars, including Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton, as an agent after they turned pro.
A 1981 Los Angeles Times investigation, interviewing 45 people affiliated with the basketball program, revealed the extent of Gilbert's involvement, describing him as "a one-man clearinghouse who has enabled players and their families to receive goods and services usually at big discounts and sometimes free." The Times investigation found that Gilbert's involvement in the program began in 1967, when UCLA stars Alcindor and Lucius Allen were considering transferring to Michigan State. They approached former UCLA star Willie Naulls, who introduced them to Gilbert. Gilbert met with the two players, and both remained at UCLA. Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, said later that he would have stayed regardless but called Gilbert "like my surrogate father." Allen credited Gilbert with dissuading him from transferring: "There were two people I listened to. Coach Wooden as long as we were between the lines. Outside the court — Sam Gilbert." Allen said Gilbert paid for multiple abortions for players' girlfriends, including one of his own. "Everybody knew what was going on," UCLA player David Greenwood said. "Nobody was so naive. It was common knowledge in the whole town."
UCLA assistant Jerry Norman, who coached under Wooden from 1957 to 1968, recalled that Gilbert began "to come around our program right when I was ready to leave. What normally happens is, alumni come to you and say, 'Coach, is there any way I can help?' Well, maybe. A lot of kids want summer jobs. But Gilbert started going behind the coaches. Alcindor calls me one day in the spring. I ask him, 'Where are you?' and he says, 'I'm in Mr. Gilbert's office.'" In his autobiography Giant Steps, Abdul-Jabbar called Gilbert "that odd combination, a cagey humanitarian with a lot of muscle. Guys would go to him when they were in trouble, and he would find a way to fix it...Sam steered clear of John Wooden, and Mr. Wooden gave him the same wide berth. Both helped the school greatly...once the money thing got worked out, I never gave another thought to leaving UCLA."
"The way Sam explained it to me, it was within the rules," Allen said in a 2007 documentary. "But it wasn't." In 1973, freshman center Richard Washington told The New York Times the reason he'd chosen UCLA: "I took a dip in Sam Gilbert's pool and it cooled me off and that was the convincer."
In 1978, NCAA field investigator J. Brent Clark testified before a Congressional subcommittee that he had begun investigating Gilbert's activities the year before but was told to back off by a superior at the NCAA, Bill Hunt. "If I had spent a month in Los Angeles, I could have put them on indefinite suspension," Clark said later, but "as long as Wooden was there, the NCAA would never have taken any action." Clark told Congress: "The conclusion I draw is that it is an example of a school that is too big, too powerful, and too well respected by the public, that the timing was not right to proceed against them.
Wooden was aware of Gilbert's closeness with his players. In 1972, Wooden said "I personally hardly know Sam Gilbert...I think he's a person who's trying to be helpful in every way that he can. I sometimes feel that in his interest to be helpful it's in direct contrast with what I would like to have him do to be helpful. I think he means very well and, for the most part, he has attached himself to the minority-race players. I really don't want to get involved in saying much about that, to be honest with you."
Despite concerns about Gilbert, Wooden said he chose not to ask players to cut off contact, telling the Times in 1981: "There's as much crookedness as you want to find. There was something Abraham Lincoln said — he'd rather trust and be disappointed than distrust and be miserable all the time. Maybe I trusted too much." The Times reporters, Mike Littwin and Alan Greenberg, concluded: "Wooden knew about Gilbert. He knew the players were close to Gilbert. He knew they looked to Gilbert for advice. Maybe he knew more. He should have known much more. If he didn't, it was only because he apparently chose not to look."
Wooden did pass along his concerns to UCLA athletic director J. D. Morgan, but Morgan did not pursue the matter aggressively, in part because he believed Gilbert was connected to the Mafia. Former UCLA chancellor Charles E. Young recalled Morgan "saying to me in that deep voice of his, 'Chuck, you don't know about Sam Gilbert. Do you want to end up on a block of concrete at the bottom of the ocean?' J. D.'s view of him was that if you cross Sam, you're likely to be killed, literally."
Gene Bartow, who succeeded Wooden as UCLA coach, felt similarly. In 1991, he wrote a letter to an NCAA official thanking him for suppressing Brent Clark's investigation into Gilbert. "I want to say 'thank you' for possibly saving my life...I believe Sam Gilbert was Mafia-related and was capable of hurting people. I think, had the NCAA come in hard while I was at UCLA, Gilbert and others associated with the program would have felt I had reported them, and I would have been in possible danger...Without question, he put out some front-end money to recruits in a few cases, and I think that could have been proven."
In 1981, after Wooden's retirement, an NCAA investigation sanctioned UCLA for its relationship with Gilbert, putting the program on probation for two seasons and ordering the school to disassociate itself from him. Three players at other universities told NCAA investigators that Gilbert had offered them cars to commit to UCLA.
In 1987, Gilbert was indicted in Florida for conspiracy, racketeering, and money laundering as part of a drug smuggling scheme, but he died of heart failure before he could be prosecuted. His son, Michael Gilbert, was convicted on four counts in the case. Trial testimony revealed that Sam Gilbert had used Miami drug money to build The Bicycle Hotel & Casino in Bell Gardens, California.